Session Information
04 SES 03 C, Teacher Education
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-28
14:00-15:30
Room:
NIG, HS C
Chair:
Lani Florian
Contribution
The purpose of this presentation is to investigate a role of Mentors in the teacher-education for special education. In particular I will discuss the current teacher taining program beimg applied in Japanese college where student-teachers want to become a teache for mentally-challenged people.
To begin, I will explain the training program which my current institution has adopted in order to cultivate the ability of students which is deemed to be necessary for the competent teacher of special education. In this program, student-teaches are encouraged to understand the significance and the particularity of the mentally-challenged people by argueing the problems which each student-teachers have to face in the learning practice. Students can obtain an experience by participating in practical-learning and experiencing about the needs of mentally-challenged people intimately as wel as their influences towards other able-bodied.
In the second part, I will refer to the arguement about the inclusive education from the viewpoint of teacher-education. Here, the problems of inclusive education are limittedly argued by taking a subject matter in painting arts for discussion. Painting art is one of the usefull materials for the mentally-challenged people in order to express what each challeged people feels and thinks. Then, the most important for each student-teacher is how to interprete this experssin of feeling and thinking for an apprehension and enhancement of a possibility of the mentally-challenged people.
I will clarify that this method in my school reforms and develops the self-critical and self-improving capacity of student-teachers, while fostering and cultivating the receptive and embracing attitude towards others at the same time. This understanding is correctly supported by a rational judgement about the needs and by an adequate moral understanding.
Because the needs of challenged people are diverse, it is essential qality requisite for the teacher to understand properly and interprete justly these needs within the theoreticall framework. To articulate this point, I will introduce the term ' Midwifely' in my presentation. The role of Midwife as a teacher is formally known as the Socratic method. Socrates argued that humans have an intrinsic desire to improve themselves and that this desire is encouraged through dialogue.
By applying dialectical method into student-teacher education as the theoretical framework, the theoretical meaning of special education is examined. My basic attempt is to bridge over the incompatibility between the relationship and the studnt-teacher and mentor.
Method
The area of curriculum for preperation course of teacher-education reforms focus on how to understand the behaviour of mentally-challenged children; taking the situation of them into acount; and learning how to work with them. After education-practie in the classroom, an open and general questionaires about opinion of student-teacher are collected and analysed. From the viepoint whether the preparation-course is effective or not and fow the problem which each student-teacher found could br resolved, the efficiency of midwifery dialogue method in teacher training is evaluated.
Expected Outcomes
I mention the importance for the teachers in the following; to nurture the compassion and the sympathetic understanding of others in practice, and to develop an autonomy and rationality, to evaluate the needs. These capacities bring understanding about the reciprocal dependecy of human-beings.As outcomes (1)I enunciate that each mentor should be a practitioner and as practitioner s/he has to commit the philosophy of the special education in daily courses in classroom. (2)In relation to the the conference theme, it is a suitable to define the theory which make the practie evident (e-vidence)in the teacher education. This viewpoint shows us the different way of thinking about the role of teacher, because studunt-teachers themselves can work in a reciprocal relation with challenged people as a midwife. (3)In practice, philosophical understanding connects the teory with the real world by means of exact descriptions and conceptual clarity,
References
G.L.Scott Plato's Socratic Education(Sunny,2000) J.Allan,Rethinking Inclusive Education(Springer,2008) D.Sedley,The Midwife of Platonism(O.U.P.,2006)
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